EVENTS

Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.

There’s been much talk over the last few years about witch hunts. Targeting Dawkins. Targeting Shermer. Targeting Hunt. Targeting anyone who happens to sit near Adria Richards. And though I think it is far from a witch hunt to be criticized by a lot of people, even by a lot of people at once, because your comments or behaviors merited criticism, for a long time I merely rolled my eyes at the inevitable, defensive backlash: “Witch hunt!”

Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.

Recently prolific news aggregator Lynna brought to my attention a legal case concerning someone guilty of sexual assault out of the Land of Silver that, shall we say, fails to glister overmuch. Unlike the attractive sparkle of a rich acanthite vein (which, it should be noted, was never found in Argentina: a premature naming by aspiring and greedy colonizers), this case burns with the unflickering monochromaticity of a neon sign reading, “ALL THE TRIGGER WARNINGS”.

When we last left our intrepid heroes, they were slogging through the twists and turns of translating “transsexual” into the language of a hypothetical world where sex == gender. As expected, there were some difficulties. Some of these difficulties arise from confusion at the statement, “just what does it mean to say that sex == gender”? While frustrating for those honestly attempting to answer the question, the confusion, I judge, is fair given that actual advocates for using sex in place of gender or gender in place of sex rarely show much of the totality of what they intend to convey by conflating the two.

There are, of course, languages where there is only one term for both sex and gender. Those folks will have had some leg up on the work. Nonetheless, the confusing world of communicating across others’ assumptions that sex == gender does not end at the creation of a definition, not even at the creation of a satisfying one. While the discussion about the implications of those definitions will continue in the original thread, here we will take things just a step further.

Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke

There have been quite a few thoughts expressed, here and elsewhere, about the appropriate uses of transsexual, transgender, trans, and trans*. The separation of sex and gender, while ostensibly default in a number of academic fields and feminist and trans philosophies or movements, is not something challenged only by right wing advocates of trans* oppressive policies. Many non-trans* feminists and many trans* liberation advocates openly oppose the use of these terms as separate. Some of that spills over onto debates about terms such as transgender.

I’d like to attempt to further explain why I believe it is so necessary to separate gender and sex in the first place, and thus at least some of the major reasons why I care about the particular uses of those trans*-community specific terms.

Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.

In a recent thread, Okidemia posed a question that many parents have these days: When and how should I teach my child/ren about trans* folk?

Okidemia framed it this way:

…kids have not been told about transpeople yet, because we don’t know any. Thus an important educationnal question:
at what age would you* speak about it to kids? (certainly, you* should begin before they meet psychologically transgendering acquaintances –as opposed to biologically transitioning which certainly happens later in life.

One of the reasons this question seems so confounding is that, like many confounding questions, it is the wrong question. [Read more…]

Here your gender-workshop-taskmistress Crip Dyke encourages you to revisit the douchegabbery of the Minnesota Child Protection League. PZ did an excellent job of illuminating just that in “Two steps forward, one step back” in December of last year, and the discussion on that thread when it was current included a great many useful comments.

I want, however, not to merely rehash criticisms of MCPL (criticisms well-deserved and well-made the first time around) but to use that example to talk a bit about what “centering” and “marginalized” really mean. In the post on the need for transfeminist critiques of other feminisms, I focussed on Katha Pollit and identified places where, quite frankly, I think she employed some bad thinking to construct some bad feminism. I suggested that marginalization had something to do with this bad thinking on Pollit’s part. Here you can learn more about exactly what marginalization has to do with it …and the extent of my criticism of Pollit, rather than merely Pollit’s column.

I didn’t pick Pollit because her work is low hanging fruit. She has written excellently on many topics. She clearly has the writing chops to be clear about the distinctions between political theorizing and political rhetoric. Yet the only reasonable inference is that she was, in fact, talking about rhetoric when she was using the phrase “political analysis”. She also has the analytical skills to make the distinction between gendered terms like the French pronouns ils and elles, and gender neutral words like people. Yet here, too, she fell down.

So what is the problem with this Katha Pollit person anyway? The problem is the same as one in our community: the inability to think like you’re not. [Read more…]

For your perusal, a new Gender Workshop post by Crip Dyke. Herein we discuss how feminists, in particular Katha Pollit, can fail to recognize feminism when it comes in the form of transfeminism. The readers themselves will have to judge the applicability of the title. For more active exercises in the workshop series, this here is a link back.

Transfeminism, as I have defined it in my teaching, is the integration of feminism into trans* advocacy simultaneously and in coordination with the integration of trans* advocacy into feminism. It is of necessity something that is often labeled “intersectional feminism” (though we’ll critique that in another post). Here I won’t go much further into what transfeminism is. Rather, we’ll take a look at how current feminism demonstrates the need for a strong transfeminist response. [Read more…]

After a long hiatus, I am attempting to rejuvenate the online gender workshop just in time for the US/Canadian school year.

In the past, we’ve focused on questions and reports back. Last time, we looked at some definitions. The initial exercises needed to be done in a state of gender naiveté. But more in depth exploration can only be done in the context of a common language and common intent. These are never naively assumed; they must be consciously adopted.

Now that we have these, let’s look at some aspects of gender in particular. Most educational focus is on gender identity and gender identification. But I find it more helpful to start with gender attribution. All of us attribute gender to others very frequently, but the process of attributing gender to ourselves is typically limited to childhood. Long before adulthood, cis* folks’ genders are assumptions living in the background of cis* lives. So let’s start by examining an activity with which we all have more practice and more familiarity: telling other people what there genders are. [Un/]Fortunately for you, I have a piece of creative writing that contains a number of good examples of gender attribution: how it happens, when it happens, and what it looks like. As a bonus which will help us segue into future discussions, it also touches on what it feels like when we are conscious of others’ efforts to attribute gender to us. This piece is called Stares. [Read more…]

When last we left our intrepid workshoppers, one month ago, we had had a rollicking discussion of definitions of gender, sex, and related terms.

One of the things that came out of that discussion is that when we are each pressed to define exactly what each of us as individuals mean by each person’s specific, personal use of terms like “gender” and “sex” and “transsexual” we not only consistently come up with different definitions, but we also routinely fail to come up with terms that actually cover everything we want to say.

In looking at people overtly performing gender, many of us struggled to find a way to express exactly what we wished to communicate using the terms we had just defined. Worse, in something little discussed as of yet, those people who are assumed to be the best and most skilled of us frequently declined to use gendered pronouns for some performers, but not others.

Why is this the case? If declining to assume an appropriate pronoun for Conchita Wurst is respectful, why not decline to assume an appropriate pronoun for Julie Andrews or Shirley Temple? One of the things we should, in fact, be discussing is the coercive nature of many gendered interactions. Did Shirley Temple choose the clothing or choreography for that scene? Did Temple have more agency in creating a gender (or a gendered image) than Conchita Wurst? At age 3 and 4? Given the legacy nature of Temple’s income and ability to work, what are the implications for Temple’s gender agency at age 40? And if Shirley Temple can’t be assumed to have had a free gender hand, why are we willing to trust an application of a gendered pronoun for Temple more than we trust an application of a gendered pronoun to Wurst?

To help solve some of these problems, it is necessary to have a common language. As revealed in previous exercises, we do not currently have that. We have idiosyncratic usage as created and modified by our successes and failures in conceptualizing and communicating sex and gender concepts. That simply isn’t enough when the times get rough.

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I’m going to apologize upfront. First, this is a day late. Real life has intervened, and it looks like every other day may end up being the schedule. I want to keep the momentum of one post a day, and I will try again to do that, but family responsibilities and an upcoming law final are limiting my ability to get longer posts done in a timely manner. For my second apology: I set up a trap exercise, at least to some extent. I won’t do this in the future, but to get a real appreciation of a trap, sometimes you have to be pushed into it. This is one of those times where the artificial trap in the exercises should (I hope) reflect the nature of traps that are integral features of the gender terrain.

I’m not trying to be difficult, but can an object be said to have a gender?

Call me a jerk for setting this trap if you like, but today we’re going to begin to go back and look at our previous definitions of masculine, feminine, woman, man, and gender. Are your definitions inclusive of objects? If not, and if you then took this exercise seriously, what does that mean?

Feminist analysis of gender has been crucial to the ethical progress the English speaking world has made in the last 200 years. I by no means wish to throw it under the bus. Nor is it illegitimate to argue that objects and their placements in pictures or videos can be used to send messages. But objects have gender only in the sense that objects have sale prices (not even just prices, but sale prices).* In the every day territory of gender naïveté, gender binarism is not merely dominant, it is literally unquestionable. But those who “problematize” gender rope in a blizzard of semiotics.

The result for trans* and intersex folk attempting to explain themselves, attempting to be, literally, recognized by others while interacting with the gender binarists is like living inside a misshapen forcefield. While others might find the field quite protective, a trans* person often can’t function without painfully straining against the field from the inside just to perform everyday tasks. The problems for intersex folk are traditionally different: as doctors are about to bestow a forcefield to an infant, the doctors recognize a difference in shape in one of the most sensitive areas of our human bodies. Thoughtfully, the doctors have a solution: cutting the body to fit the forcefield.

In conversations around gender in those willing to consider either modified gender binarism (yes, it’s binary, but man is not isomorphic with male, and woman is not isomorphic with female) or non-binary gender, it is now possible to have a conversation with others about how trans* people are gendered and intersex people are sexed. However, this topic is given weight and treatment distressingly similar to that of discussions on the gendering of staircases.

In one world, we are painfully confined and, since we are assumed not to exist (and cannot be properly seen through the distorted field when we try to make ourselves known), have no access to help. Our requests for help are not even intelligible. In another world, we have the same status as fascinating objects. In short, there is no language, there is no context, in which trans* people have full humanity. Intersex people are denied their humanity in ways different, but just as consequential.

Where are the gender-descriptive or gender-identifying words that area always humanizing (could never be applied to mere objects), yet just as applicable to trans* and intersex folk as to non-intersex cis folk? Have you seen any in any of the discussion here yet?

This provides an environment of forced choice: if a person can cushion contacts with the field through throwing on a sequined pill-box hat, a tuxedo, a pair of doc martens, or all 3 at once, might it be worth the confinement to have the protection of the forcefield, now that the protection is merely confining, and not actually harmful? If a person feels sufficiently protected by other forces, might more freedom of movement be worth tossing aside the safety of the force field?

And here we get to interesting questions. Like all lives, trans* lives are confluent lives. Is it possible that a person with more money, more class status, or whiter skin will be more likely to feel safe enough without a forcefield? Which disabilities make a person less threatening, and thus less a target for certain types of violence? Which disabilities make a person appear powerless, and thus more of a target for certain types of violence? How many disabilities have both these effects? The effects of confluence are a major factor influencing the number of murders of MtF PoC.

These effects also influence whether a particular victim is more likely to be identified publicly as a victim of a gender or sex motivated murder. Is an FtM person who goes by Alex and wears Dickies going to have hir story told accurately in the paper? Is a wealthy, white MtF person murdered at home going to have family or others concealing the circumstances (even the victim’s clothing!) to “protect his reputation”? And will the police be more likely to forgive the family their deceptions and accede to their wishes than they would be for an MtF person of color murdered on the way home from a bus stop?**

Any number of aspects of trans* life are directly affected by class, race, gender assignment at birth, legal sex, religion, and other socially important aspects of our lives and bodies. But one thing does not change: the gendered world around us is thoroughly dominated by a culture created by and for cis* people. In that world, because of that culture, cis* folks’ obsession with gender rules.

Obsession?

Well, yes. You’re the group that defines gender in terms of people but then tries to shoehorn in pencils and mugs. It is not enough that we have to know the gender of the people around us, but if we wish to engage with others, we have to know the gendered implications of literally everything around us, our entire context.

Why? Social rules and social consequences. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s trivially easy to prove that behavior varies with the gender of one’s interaction partner. Studies of eye contact initiation, cessation, and duration between pairs of persons serve quite ably as proof of concept.*** Violating social rules caries consequences. In an effort to minimize those consequences, it becomes vital for those living in a gendered system to be aware of context and follow social rules of gender. While “nature” might have soft, feminine connotations in many contexts, “the outdoors” might have masculine connotations just as often. Which did your conversation partner use to describe the setting of a vacation? How do patterns of word choice (and tone of voice, use of questions and question marks, and more) influence how one is perceived? While it’s perfectly fine to be something other than a housewife-paragon or warrior-paragon, the more one deviates from gender expectations, the higher grow the risks.

Cis* people often have traumatic stories to tell about younger years when learning contextual gender interpretation and gender risk management. But for cis* folk, by definition, it is possible to live a psychologically healthy <i>adult</i> life that feels authentic <b>and</b> which is also sufficiently far away from the risky features of the gender terrain for cis* persons to make the vast majority of choices without any fear that <i>this one small step</i> will be the step to cause an injurious – or fatal – fall.

It is this relative safety, the distance from dangerous edges, that makes it possible for a cis* dominated culture to be so gender naive and gender obsessed at the same time. Without criticizing anyone, I note that the conversation about what is phallic took (predictably) quite confusing turns: a hexagonal pencil might not be phallic, one suggested, but a cylindrical pencil just might. Likewise, in everyday contexts, children must learn that grabbing a softball for a game of catch is coded feminine, while grabbing the smaller baseball is coded masculine. Take the time to read through just a little bit of past discussion again. Without taking anything away from the utility of becoming **aware** of gender signals, what does it reveal about the depth of our societies’ gender obsessions that we can find gendered cues literally everywhere we look? Imagine being so frequently at the edges that literally anything – whether one’s pencil is hexagonal or cylindrical – might be enough to make one’s gender a safety liability.

Moreover, we excuse our gender obsessions in ways that are horribly harmful. Most of us are willing to go so far as to say that objects <b>have</b> gender, rather than that we, as humans, project gender onto those objects in a manner as artificial as a shopkeeper slapping on a sale price. The price is by no means a property of the object, nor is the gender. It is a property of ourselves, which is, in part, why we can differ so much as individuals and as societies in the gendering of clothes, mugs, and other objects. When we dodge responsibility by saying things like, “Blue <b>is</b> a masculine color,” rather than, “I masculinize blue,” we are teaching gender irresponsibility and gender naturalism at the same time. Is it any wonder then, that in those too-common cases where trans* people’s assailants or murderers are brought before a justice system, defendants will displace the source of rage onto the victim? Is it any wonder that jurors, judges, and the media sympathize with defendant whose expectations of naturalism were violated and who certainly played no role in <b>creating</b> those expectations? If they did recognize that, rather than trans* deception or trans* victimization of cis* folk, what was actually happening was a setting of a trap by cis* folk specifically to catch out and punish trans* folk for being trans*, those jurors, judges, and media representatives might feel uncomfortably guilty.

And they should. While those determined to protect themselves from harm through the reinforcement of rigid gender forcefields go about deliberately confusing sex and gender, those like feminists who have much to gain from separating the two appear to be unable to muster a consistent vision of separate sex and gender, and in both cases the ultimate effects on those outside the norms of gender and sex are similar: dehumanization and invisibility.

So let’s take a look back at our original definitions from a less naive stance. The point of these exercises is still to get a definition of these terms <b>as you use them</b>, not as you would like them to be used. We will come back to these definitions one more time at the end of the workshop to come up with some that we feel will be helpful going forward <b>after</b> the workshop, but changing habits is hard if we don’t know what the habits are in the first place.

Exercise 12: Redefinitions. Let’s look carefully at just a few definitions:

a. Gender

b. Man

c. Woman

d. Feminine

e. Masculine

Try to come up with a new definition for at least 3 of these. Use your experience in the video exercise (including your critiques or rebuttals, and others’ critiques of your ideas) to guide you. Look back at the cues you used: these are gender cues, even where the assumption is that they reveal something about sex directly and gender only indirectly. What definitions of masculine and feminine accurately represent the indications of femininity or masculinity that you used?

Now think about the object exercise: did you gender an object? If you did, how can you define gender consistently with how it has been used by you in these exercises? Many people in gender studies break gender down into subcategories. Would you find it helpful to create multiple, subcategoric definitions? What would the subcategories be? What would the definitions be?

Exercise 13: Justice. No one used the word, or even from what I remember the concept, of justice in these definitions during our first attempts to understand these words. Does the concept of justice belong in the definition? Is gender active or passive? Are we better defining gender first and then looking at the implications for in/justice? Or are we better off specifically defining gender in part in relationship to how it contains or enacts in/justice? As a separate matter, note that I’ve been using pretty common psychological testing schemes: present one exercise, with attention to certain details, but actually testing and examining different details. Did you feel trapped? Do you feel like the exercises were unfair in having both a surface point <b>and</b> an unstated expectation that you would likely reveal what I’m calling gender naïveté and gender obsession? Is the experience of a gender-trap familiar to you? If you aren’t trans*, is it possible to see how the relentless examination of so many aspects of a person’s look, behavior, and context might be harmful? For trans* folks: do you find your response to be more often one of exhaustion or pain, or do you find yourself to be cultivating ignorance of the relentlessness of gendering as a coping strategy? Both?

Exercise 14: 4th Report. Unlike other reports, there is no part of exercises 12 or 13 that I’m not encouraging you to report back. Post as much of that thinking as you are comfortable making public. Only after that should you feel free to pick out individual portions of this post for free form response, but, yes, once 12 and 13 are done, anything in here is fair game for any type of serious response.

*I’ll let you all work on that for a while. Clearly we have some great minds working this stuff out here. If y’all want me to go into that metaphor more later, I might.

** It seems highly unlikely that the apparent targeting of MtF PoC over other trans* people does not reflect a reality of greater actual targeting of MtF PoC. But we’re frustratingly unable to know for sure, or to quantify those risks.